Using AMF as a file format

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, ActionScript 3, Applications, CSSAug 26th, 2009 | 4 Comments Flash is a great platform. You can build applications for the browser, the desktop, and… well, what else is there? When building applications, especially those with a document-based model such as the Aviary apps, Odosketch, My Canvas, ZenStudio, the apps on acrobat.com, and many others, you need a file format for the document or project. Or some way to save it. What Not To Do You don’t want to save each item into a table in the database. I know a guy…who had a dream…that his friend did this. This guy’s friend in his dream had a table for each item that needed to be...

Would it be bad to leave behind our Flash roots?

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, Flash, FlexMay 14th, 2009 | 3 Comments I am working with Tyler on Stealth, our high-performance component framework. After reading this article on performance by Arno Gourdol of Adobe I began wondering if we should leave behind our Flash roots of motion and timeline design by defaulting framerate to 0 in our Stealth-based applications. Framerate makes great sense when doing games or timeline based animations, but in applications do we need it? We can update the screen on mouse moves, roll overs, etc. with the MouseEvent.updateAfterEvent instance method. And for transitions and tweening the class could use a Timer for the duration of...

Layered Content, 2 Parts

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, Applications, Layered ContentJul 8th, 2008 | 2 Comments I’ve had some time between jobs recently and been working on Layered Content. Layered Content is a website management system or web content management system (CMS). I’ve had a lot of fun over the past two years using it, architecting it, and planning it out. When I started I was determined to make a usable CMS, one that didn’t require training courses to use, one that wasn’t too simple that you couldn’t make the website you wanted. A big challenge, but one I felt needed to finally be addressed by somebody. There have been a couple versions, the first was completely...

AIR ActiveRecord is Open Source

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIRApr 29th, 2008 | 13 Comments I wrote about an Active Record implementation for the Adobe Integrated Runtime using it's SQLite database functionality. I put up all the code on Google Code under the name AIR Active Record. Please check it out, let me know of bugs or features, or better yet, submit fixes and add-ons. If you're interested in being an active developer on it let me know. Update: To use the ActiveRecord (sorry for the lack of documentation), you need to extend it with a class for each table you'll use. For example, if I wanted an employee table I would create an Employee class like this: package {  ...

AIR Project Tracker (timer, task-list)

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, Flex, GeneralJan 12th, 2008 | 28 Comments I wrote a project timer awhile ago. After I had done that (in Flash 8) I needed a task list that could be split up by client and project, so I combined the old time and a new task list into what I called creatively the Project Tracker. I've been using it since Apollo preview release. I just added a new feature for myself that rounds the times to the nearest half-hour or hour if desired (since that's how my company bills clients), and I thought that I'd share it. It allows you to keep track of time spent on tasks, project, and clients as well as let's you check off any of them when complete. You...

Idea for an AIR App

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, GeneralJan 10th, 2008 | No Comments I'm working on a library to give rich text or WYSIWYG functionality to an AIR HTMLLoader. It's coming along nicely thus far. I have all the keyboard shortcuts happening and the HTML is being replaced by the appropriate stuff (e.g. bold fixes webkit's <span class="Apple-blah blah" style="font-weight: bold"> to just <b>). I've got undo/redo in place even with typing and deleting etc. So I was thinking, it would be cool to write a DocBook editor in AIR. It might be the first DocBook authoring tool that looked nice. :) DocBook is an XML format for books or documentation. I won't go into...